Another day, another incredible James Webb Space Telescope image, and this time, we see the star forming dusty ribbons in dwarf galaxy NGC 346. This dynamic region is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) around 200,000 light-years from Earth. It was of particular interest due to the conditions and amount of metals withing the SMC that resemble those seen in galaxies billions of years ago.
Studying this region allows researchers to observe protostars still in the process of forming and compare it to those in our own Milky Way galaxy. When stars form, they collect gas and dust, resulting in ribbons like those seen in the Webb image above. All of this materials gathers to form an accretion disk that feeds the central protostar.
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We’re seeing the building blocks, not only of stars, but also potentially of planets. And since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to galaxies during cosmic noon, it’s possible that rocky planets could have formed earlier in the universe than we might have thought,” said Guido De Marchi of the European Space Agency, a co-investigator on the research team.
